B.C. actress, 12, stars in 'Possession'

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JORDAN RIEFE, Special to QMI Agency

Aug 31, 2012

, Last Updated: 4:43 PM ET

LOS ANGELES -- It could have been hell finding the right actress to play a demonically-possessed girl.

But Danish director Ole Bornedal -- who was prepared to audition hundreds of hopefuls for the mentally and physically demanding role of Em in The Possession -- found 12-year-old Vancouver native Natasha Calis almost immediately.

During her audition, Calis adapted an alter-ego -- an elderly Polish woman who seemed to take over the girl. The performance not only won her the part but inspired the writers to make the possessive demon in the script a Polish woman.

In the movie's scariest scenes, the demon manifests in the form of a sphinx moth, an insect almost the size of a humming bird. In one instance, Em's older sister comes into a darkened room and turns on the light to find Em sitting on her bed with hundreds of moths flying around her.

"It was very scary," recalls Calis. "I was in this dark room and they were just dumping buckets upon buckets of moths all over me. And I didn't know what was crawling on me because it was dark."

Calis tries to sound upbeat about the scene but admits that it was no fun at all. "After it was all done, I brushed of all the poop and everything all over me. I learned to keep cool on the outside but I was freaking out on the inside."